Gemini 4 Argon goes paid-first, HomeView hits Rs 39,900, and there is no digital arrest

Google opened Gemini 4 Argon to a much wider group on October 13: developers on the API, plus Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in the Gemini app and AI Mode. Free users aren't mentioned anywhere in Google's post, which tells you most of what you need to know about who this launch is for. The API is cheap for now at $2 in and $10 out per million tokens, and it doubles on November 30. If you build things, test it this month. If you don't, there's no reason to buy a subscription on the strength of a benchmark chart Google drew itself.

Apple HomeView will cost Rs 39,900 in India, with pre-orders open since October 13 and sales from November 13. Yesterday we said India had no price or date, and that turned out to be wrong: India is in the first wave, while the EU doesn't get it at all because Siri AI isn't allowed there yet. The wall version needs a mount that starts at Rs 6,900, which is a very Apple way to price a screw-on bracket. For a 7-inch screen, this only pays off if your home already runs on Apple gear and you're betting the new Siri is as good as Apple says.

WhatsApp has a setting called Block unknown account messages, under Settings, Privacy, Advanced. Once it's on, an unknown account that blasts you with messages gets blocked automatically before it fills your chat list. It doesn't screen every stranger, and WhatsApp doesn't say what counts as high volume, so treat it as a filter for the spray-and-pray scammers rather than a force field. Ten seconds to switch on, and it pairs well with today's digital-arrest warning.

There is no such thing as a digital arrest, and Hyderabad Police said so again on October 14 after a 72-year-old woman lost Rs 2.20 crore to a fake CBI officer on a video call. The script is always the same: a parcel or your Aadhaar is linked to a crime, an officer appears on camera with a warrant, you're told to stay alone and tell nobody, and then comes the deposit. The newest twist I've seen is in Pune, where scammers name-dropped the Data Protection Board of India to sound current. If someone official wants you alone, on camera and paying, you already know the answer.

XBOW revealed on October 13 that AI agents running GPT-5.6 Sol built a full Chrome exploit chain in six days with about $40,000 of compute, and Google paid it a $250,000 bounty. Humans picked the targets and checked the work, so this isn't a robot hacker acting alone, but it's still a huge drop in what this kind of attack costs. Brokers advertise up to $1.5 million for the same class of exploit. When finding bugs gets this cheap, the only defence ordinary people control is how fast they install fixes, and that starts with actually restarting Chrome when the button turns red.